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Mechatronics Zone Blog

Winners of the 2017 Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards were announced during a live ceremony held at the San Jose Convention Center, in conjunction with Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley.

Researchers in Singapore have developed one of the smallest and most versatile sensors yet for healthcare applications with the design of a stretchable microfiber sensor with the diameter of a strand of human hair.

A team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) developed the sensor, which can be woven into textiles—such as a glove—to monitor the vital signs of patients, such as heart rates and blood pressure.

RiSC-V, the open-source computer core architecture, will be getting a big push from Western Digital in the coming years as the company has pledged to transitioning its own consumption of processors to RISC-V. According to the company Western Digital ships over one billion cores per year, and plans to double that number. And if all goes according to plan, they will all be based on RISC-V.

When technology history is written, 2013 and 2014 will be noted as the years of “peak hype” for 3D printing. The promise of a “3D printer in every home” was a popular one in technology news. As we near the dawn of 2018, the hype has receded, and 3D printer manufacturers have realized two things: most people don’t need a 3D printer in their home, and even if they had one, they’d spend more time on the phone troubleshooting with customer service because of the printers’ inherent complexity.

Texas Instruments Inc. is setting its sights on analog designers with the introduction of two new microcontrollers (MCUs) and an e-book to help them put an inexpensive mixed-signal twist on simple applications.

The new microcontrollers start for as little as 25 cents and can be used in simple electronic applications, such as wake-up controllers and real-time clocks, which may not have employed microcontrollers previously.

With the large-scale penetration of renewable energy, both at the utility and residential levels, comes a number of challenges, including integrating this capacity, with its unique, intermittent characteristics, onto the grid.

The co-inventor of USB is building a smart house. Since his retirement, Ajay Bhatt, who spent over two decades at Intel specializing in platform architectures and developing technologies such as accelerated graphics port (AGP) and PCI-Express, has spent the last year experimenting with the Internet of Things (IoT), specifically by building a own smart home.

Featured Video

THE DRIVE TO FLEXIBLE AUTOMATION

THE DRIVE TO FLEXIBLE AUTOMATION

With today’s trend toward high mix, low volume manufacturing, the need for more flexible and smarter automation is paramount. This video by National Instruments explores how the combination of robotics, measurements and vision can help boost productivity.